Yum Search Extended

Juan A. Suárez

Before that, I was using Ubuntu, but decided to switch to Fedora for several
reasons that are not worth explaining here. In any case, after switching to
Fedora there was something that I was missing quite a lot:
the aptitude package manager. aptitude is a deb package manager,
similar to apt. What I really like about aptitude is its flexibility when
searching packages.

While apt or yum allows to specify the search term, they just get all the
packages matching the search text, but they don’t allow you where to search. Do
you want to get only packages that are not installed? Or do you just remember
the package had python in the name, and part of the description? With aptitude
this is not a problem, as it allows you to specify such search expressions.

Though search in yum is not so flexible, as far as I know, it has a nice
feature: it allows plugins to implement new features. So several
months ago I wrote a plugin to mimic the aptitude search
flexibility: yum searchex (search extended).

It is worth saying that I didn’t want to imitate the full aptitude
functionality; only those features that I really missed from Ubuntu.

The basic idea is specifying for each term where to search. This is done by
prefixing the text with ~ and a letter that expresses where to search. In some
cases, the text to search is not needed. For instance, to search only in the
list of installed packages, we would use ~i.

The full list of the available options can be found in
the project forge.

As an example is worth a thousand words, let’s show how to search a package that
we know it contains python in the name, it is not installed, and also we
remember it has something to do with KDE: